Activists from around the world will begin attempting to create a twitterstorm in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Twitter tonight. The opposition is coming from activists on both the left and right wing of the political spectrum.

The twitterstorm operation is set to begin at 7PM Eastern and will attempt to make the hashtag #StopTheTPP trend on Twitter, in hopes of raising awareness of the secretive trade deal being brokered among a dozen nations. The nations involved are the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. The Office of the United States Trade Representative hosts a blanket statement about the trade deal on its website stating in part

"For all TPP countries, an ambitious, comprehensive and high-standard agreement that achieves the goals established in Honolulu in 2011 is critical for creating jobs and promoting growth, providing opportunity for our citizens and contributing to regional integration and the strengthening of the multilateral trading system."

Brokers recruit and sell homeless people as workers to clear the site of Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.

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The night is cold here in Sendai, far to the north of Tokyo. This station's the warmest place to sleep for people living rough. It's also a fertile recruiting ground. Brokers are selling homeless people like this to companies cleaning up radiation in Fukushima. Shizuya Nishiyama's been sleeping rough for a year, and he's twice been sent to scrub down radioactive hotspots.

{Shizuya Nishiyama, Homeless Man}:
"We're an easy target for recruiters. We turn up here with all our bags, wheeling them around and around the station and we're easy to spot. Then they say to us: 'Are you looking for work? Are you hungry?'"

Activists say homeless people are flocking here from across Japan to look for work in the tsunami-devastated north. But the safer jobs are now in short-supply. Yasuhiro Aoki is leader of this homeless support group. Many workers are reaching their radiation limits, he says, so there's a shortage and the homeless are being used to fill in the gaps.

There are no figures for the number of homeless people cleaning up Fukushima. Government rules don't require checks on the lowest tier of companies supplying workers. On the eleventh floor of this apartment block lives one of Sendai's labor brokers, Seiji Sasa.

{Seiji Sasa, Labor Broker}:
"I don't ask any questions, that's not my job. I just find people and send them to work. I send them and get money in exchange. That's it. I don't get involved in what happens after that."

Back at Sendai Station, radiation is the last thing on Nishiyama's mind. He says he just wants to make it through the winter.

Zookeepers at the Ramat Gan Zoo in Tel Aviv were sure they were dealing with yet another penguin couple, but in a routine blood exam they realized that the two penguins were both in fact female. (Dec. 22)

- I don't think of this as just one more way of Mother Nature confirming that homosexuality is as normal a human possibility as apple pie, I like to think of this as Mother Nature's way of just fucking with Westboro Baptist Church.

Scientists have discovered that bacteria found in a traditional Japanese pickle can prevent flu. Could this be the next superfood?

The research, which assesses the immune-boosting powers of Lactobacillus brevis from Suguki – a pickled turnip, popular in Japan – in mice that have been exposed to a flu virus, is published today (06 November) in the SfAM journal, Letters in Applied Microbiology.

Lead researcher, Ms Naoko Waki of KAGOME CO., LTD. in Japan said: "Our results show that when a particular strain of Lactobacillus brevis is eaten by mice, it has protective effects against influenza virus infection."

Suguki enthusiasts have often cited its protective powers but it is not known yet whether the same effects will be seen in humans. Human clinical trials using a probiotic drink containing Lactobacillus brevis KB290 bacteria are underway and scientists are hopeful that, given a suitable quantity of bacteria, foods containing them may turn out to be the next superfood.

It is time to crank up the Looney Tunes theme song because Wall Street has officially entered crazytown territory. Stocks just keep going higher and higher, and at this point what is happening in the stock market does not bear any resemblance to what is going on in the overall economy whatsoever. So how long can this irrational state of affairs possibly continue? Stocks seem to go up no matter what happens. If there is good news, stocks go up. If there is bad news, stocks go up. If there is no news, stocks go up. On Thursday, the day after Christmas, the Dow was up another 122 points to another new all-time record high.

In fact, the Dow has had an astonishing 50 record high closes this year. This reminds me of the kind of euphoria that we witnessed during the peak of the housing bubble. At the time, housing prices just kept going higher and higher and everyone rushed to buy before they were “priced out of the market”. But we all know how that ended, and this stock market bubble is headed for a similar ending. It is almost as if Wall Street has not learned any lessons from the last two major stock market crashes at all.

Just look at Twitter. At the current price, Twitter is supposedly worth 40.7 BILLION dollars. But Twitter is not profitable. It is a seven-year-old company that has never made a single dollar of profit. Not one single dollar. In fact, Twitter actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter alone. And Twitter is expected to continue losing money for all of 2015 as well. But Twitter stock is up 82 percent over the last 30 days, and nobody can really give a rational reason for why this is happening.

Overall, the Dow is up more than 25 percent so far this year. Unless something really weird happens over the next few days, it will be the best year for the Dow since 1996. It has been a wonderful run for Wall Street. Unfortunately, there are a whole host of signs that we have entered very dangerous territory.

An Iowa State University professor has resigned after being accused of spiking rabbit blood to make it appear that an AIDS vaccine{my emphasis} was working better in the research animals than it really was. Dr. Dong-Pyou Han was an assistant professor of biomedical sciences. He resigned in October after admitting responsibility, an ISU spokesman said.

The fraudulent results helped an ISU research team gain millions of dollars in federal money, according to Dr. James Bradac, who helps oversee AIDS vaccine grants for the National Institutes of Health.

Bradac said in a phone interview Monday that Han apparently added human blood components to the rabbit blood to skew the results. The human blood came from people whose bodies had produced antibodies to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Bradac said. The presence of these antibodies in the rabbits’ blood made it appear that the vaccine was spurring the animals to build defenses against HIV. “This positive result was striking, and it caught everybody’s attention,” Bradac said.

Federal documents released Monday show the results were presented at numerous scientific meetings over several years{my emphasis}. But researchers at other institutions became suspicious after they were unsuccessful in duplicating the ISU results.

Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) -- The sons of at least three government ministers, the head of a public bank, several bureaucrats and high-profile businessmen were detained by Turkish police Tuesday as part of a sweeping corruption probe, state-run media reported.

Analysts called the move a signal of the growing rift within Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party ahead of local elections in the spring. The detentions came after a two-year probe by the Istanbul Prosecutor's Office into allegations of corruption including money laundering, gold smuggling and bribery, according to the semi-official Anadolu news agency.

*SNIP*

The sons of Interior Minister Muammer Guler, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Environment and Urban Planning Minister Erdogan Bayraktar were detained in the raids, according to local media. The head of a large construction company, Ali Agaoglu, was also brought in within the scope of the investigation, though the CEO of the company later told Dogan News Agency that Agaoglu was not the focus of the investigation.

Local commentators and analysts see the raids as the most public confirmation of the developing rift between Erdogan’s ruling party and supporters of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric living in Pennsylvania{my emphasis} whose loose network of followers are thought to hold key positions within the judiciary and police force.

The Hizmet Movement, the name preferred by Gulen’s followers, has in the past thrown its support behind the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, led by Erdogan, but the two have been publicly at odds over the last month. “It was a forced marriage and now it’s an ugly divorce,” said Ahmet Sik, a journalist who wrote a book on Gulen and his influence within the judiciary and the police force. (VIDEO)